


Chasm

by tielan



Category: Terminator
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-07
Updated: 2011-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:17:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a chasm between who he is and who he's meant to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasm

Between the man he is and the man he needs to be there is a chasm.

He has lived the last nine years on the run, never stopping for breath, never stopping to be found, always running lest he be caught, tagged, identified. His future is his past is his future and it circles around him, not like a loop of time but like a flock of vultures. And the corpse upon which they feast is his present.

The future, seen in the body of the cyborg he remembers in his teeaged years, has not materialised as his mother so fiercely believed.

His past is like a dream, a tale told to the credulous and believing.

His present is rootless, groundless, shifting sand.

Who knows where his future lies?

His mother believed that the time for Judgement Day was over, gone.

John cannot believe the same. He wishes he could, but the dreams of his future lie thickly dustlike on his present and he cannot move beneath the weight.

Sarah Connor is dead and the passion of that vision of the future with her. But the memory remains.

He was always amazed by her intensity, by the strength with which she believed in his future destiny. John was brought up on his destiny from the moment he was old enough to understand what a destiny or a future was. She taught him, trained him, and believed in him with all the force of belief that could come from a mere mortal.

And even in death, the memory of her was and always would be immortal to John.

John Connor is not immortal.

John Connor is mere flesh and blood and bone. Flesh and blood and bone of Sarah, and yet so fragile a vessel for the future she placed on his shoulders. He knows this. And he hates it.

He cannot be more than he is now. He was more once: when he was a child, arrogant and assured. But that was adolescent recklessness, the belief of a child that the world was his oyster if only he reached out and grabbed it.

The man that teenager became is far different in many respects. He became an adult with an awareness of the world and how it works. The adult knows as the teenager did not: nobody hails a hero whose star has not risen and may never yet rise.

But in one thing, he is not yet adult.

He cannot give up his dreams.

Or perhaps it is that his dreams will not give him up. They claim him every night, chipping away at the edges while he sleeps, bones and blood and metal and pain and the relentless tide of the human race's need.

John is swallowed whole; a Jonah in the belly of the whale, sitting in the dark stench of the unborn future. He does not know if what awaits him is salvation or damnation, and he will not give himself over to either. Not yet.

The chasm looms.


End file.
